


A Woman for All Seasons

by asuralucier



Category: John Wick (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Dating, F/M, Helen POV, Pre-Canon, The Impossible Task, Vignette Format
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:46:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21852967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asuralucier/pseuds/asuralucier
Summary: There are three people in this relationship: Helen, John, and the shadow that John used to be.
Relationships: Helen Wick/John Wick
Comments: 6
Kudos: 111
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	A Woman for All Seasons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Karios](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karios/gifts).

Helen, like any normal person, makes mistakes.

Some are worse than others. Once, she totals a car. Her uncle’s car. He’s flash, comes to visit them from the West Coast -- Santa Monica, California -- which is not Hollywood but it’s nearby; he drives past Hollywood on his way to work. California seems like the other side of the world for a teenaged girl who’s never set foot outside of Rye, New York.

“Anyway,” Helen says. “It was a pretty cool car. A muscle car, a Mustang, Mach 1. I drove it into a tree, one of those really gnarly oaks down the block. And then my uncle never came to visit us ever again. I think my parents were relieved. I didn’t even get into that much trouble.”

She’s since moved to the city, seen more of the world. It’s amazing how much of the world you can cram into three hundred square miles.

And yet she’s never seen anyone like him. The man, who introduces himself as John, no last name (not yet) is a thinking man in action. He doesn’t speak much, but Helen can see that he’s always thinking about it. What he might say or do next.

John laughs, the sound clear and strangely young, and then he stops.

“Sorry.”

“You can laugh,” Helen assures him, over the top of her coffee. “It’s fine. I laugh about it now.”

But the moment is gone, that glimpse of John as another person securely tucked away once more. He says, “I can’t start over again.”

Now Helen wants to laugh. But something tells her not to. “Hey. Don’t worry about it. It’s weird that people can laugh on command anyway. It’s why I can’t ever be an actress.”

John (still no last name) sometimes drops in to see her at work. Jobs are hard going in New York. Helen has two of them. One’s at a restaurant and the other’s at a movie theatre, a small artsy place that only seats fifty people maximum. So in that sense, it’s not really a job at all. She’s working on a third, but so far nothing’s panned out.

John knows about her job at the restaurant, but he doesn’t know about the theatre, except maybe he does. In movies, this is considered a Good Thing. A Sweet Romantic Thing, which suggests that He Likes You.

In real life, it suggests maybe the exact opposite. But it’s hard to put John into that pigeonhole, because he’s so earnest about everything.

“Won’t the theatre go out of business?” he says. “Nobody knows you’re here.”

It’s cold out and Helen shivers with the brisk cold wind that’s cutting through the air. She sneezes, and then says, “But you do. Somehow. I like to think we’re exclusive.” Actually, it might be better if she clarified, so Helen does. "The theatre, not us.”

But he’s right, the theatre will probably go out of business sooner rather than later. Without a word, John takes off his jacket and drapes it around her shoulders.

What he’s wearing underneath looks expensive and tailored, but not particularly warm. Still, Helen is not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. She nods thanks, pulling his coat tighter around herself.

It seems polite to at least ask, even though John sits perfectly upright next to her, resolutely unbowed by the cold and the wind. “Are you going to be okay?”

“I was once in Moscow in the dead of winter,” John says. Which is really not an acceptable answer to Helen’s question no matter how she tries to look at it. Then John changes the topic, and that’s just as well. He glances at her without moving his head. Somehow, she just knows. “Does that mean you’re seeing other people?”

“Not really.” Helen shakes her head. “But this is New York, you don’t really.” She takes a minute, starts again. John’s proved to be the patient type; Helen thinks he won’t mind. “...No, I’m not. But I don’t even know your last name. Everybody’s named John when they want to be someone else.”

“I think about that a lot,” John says, to her surprise.

“Being someone else?”

“Yes,” John says, and suddenly Helen’s joke (because it is a joke) seems deathly unfunny. “I’m sorry to have bothered you at work.” He stands, starts to move away while Helen’s still wrapped up in his coat.

“John, wait.” Helen stands too. She’s tall enough to be awkward, and that’s something that she thinks about from time to time, as an unavoidable reality when she has to take the subway to and from work. But he’s taller still, and looks down at her now, almost as if he doesn’t really recognize her. “I’m sorry I said that. I was joking.”

John looks surprised. Then he seems to reconsider her words, in light of this new context. He kind of looks like he wants to laugh, but doesn’t manage it, in the end. “Okay.”

“Tell me who you are,” Helen says. “I don’t even mind if you want to be someone else. As long as you don’t mind that I’m Just Helen. I don’t really have time to think about anyone else.”

He isn’t wearing any gloves, but his hands are warm anyway. “Hi, Just Helen. My name is John Wick.”

John has beautiful manners. He knows which fork to use during what course as part of a proper dinner, and he really knows his way around a suit. He treats Helen the way that she’s only read about in books. John’s a reader; sometimes Helen wonders if he’s read the same books she has. It’s unlikely, but just look at the state of her life.

Her parents like him, which is a surprise and then not. If Helen stays single any longer, she thinks her mother might revolt.

“Do you even know what he does for a living? I don’t trust a man who lives in a suit.”

Helen gives her mother a halfway exasperated look. “Dad lived in a suit. Sorry, Dad.”

“But not on weekends,” her mother says, patting her father’s knee as he reaches to pour himself more Scotch. It’s not anything he hasn’t heard before, so it's pointless to argue. “I trusted him on the weekends.”

“I do a lot of things,” John says.

“Like?”

Usually, Helen doesn’t pry. People make mistakes. John doesn’t seem to have a job, but he wears a suit like he does, and sometimes she can’t get a hold of him. But he always comes back. And from time to time, when they’re in bed together with the light on, maybe she sees a scar or a bruise (or several), that wasn’t there previously.

“I clean.” John turns the page of his book. “I drive. I...do other things.”

Helen peeks over at the cover; it’s one of those dimeback Scandi thrillers. The kind that you can buy for cheap at an airport to pass the time. “Are you still trying to be someone else, John?”

“Not someone else.” John shakes his head. “Just anyone at all.”

She finds his hand under the covers and gives it a squeeze. “Just John, and Just Helen. That’s all we have to be.”

“The face that launched a thousand ships,” says the man who has come into the restaurant where Helen works and has asked very politely to be seated in her section. He has blond, graying hair and eyes that are shockingly light to go with. “Helen of Troy.”

“I haven’t heard that one in a while,” Helen says. “Can I get you anything to drink?”

The man says he’ll have a glass of still water and a sandwich. He is exceedingly polite, almost to the point where Helen feels her skin crawling with it. John’s politeness is warm, if at times uncertain. The politeness of this man is completely the opposite of that, like a sheet of well-polished glass. She imagines John cracking under this man’s exceedingly strange politeness.

No wonder he wants to be someone else.

Helen makes the mistake of telling John about the man with the glass politeness. John gets angry. He doesn’t shout, or punch a wall, or anything like that. He just stares straight ahead, dark and bleak, sucking all the air out of the room.

Helen goes to sit out on the stoop. The air doesn’t smell great, but at least some of it gets into her lungs and keeps her alive.

“I’m sorry,” John says, stepping to sit beside her. “I’ll tell him not to do that again. He won’t fucking do that again.”

“Who is he?” Helen finds her favorite place just under John’s chin, by his collarbone.

“Do you want to know?” His lips are light at the top of her head. “I’ll tell you if you want to know.”

It’s not something she’s ever thought about. Not in any serious terms, even though Helen is sure her mother has. But she isn’t her mother. Maybe learning John Wick’s secrets is how her life will really take off and start. But since she’d crashed her uncle’s beloved Mustang Mach 1 at the age of sixteen, she’s been rather averse to adventure. She likes her life the way it is.

“But you won’t like me very much,” John says. “If I tell you.”

“Then tell me something else,” Helen suggests. “Something that’ll help me forget I asked.” That seems fair, something she can live with.

“I love you.”

She tips her head up to look at him and they kiss very slowly. John doesn’t say that often, but when he does, it’s always with the whole of himself in it. It’s how she notices the shadow in John’s body. This shadow has no place in his life when he is in love. It oozes out of him, ashamed and guilty, into the everyday grime that stains the sidewalk in front of their house.

“I love you too.”

“Have you ever done something impossible, Helen?”

She’s at her parents’ house in Rye. Her parents are off vacationing somewhere in Canada. It’s their fortieth anniversary. Anniversaries are a big deal to them both, since they only come around once. Helen’s left John in the city, and she thought nothing of it, his refusal to come and house-sit with her, until a beautiful woman with an Italian accent and a handful of men with guns showed up and refused to leave. They stand nose to nose just staring at each other. The woman has nice teeth.

“Like it’s impossible to get you people to leave my house?”

“I can see why John likes you, you’re funny.”

Helen’s stomach is feeling pretty funny right about now. She tries to remember whether she has had dinner.

Helen asks, “Where’s John? Tell me where he is.”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” the woman says. “Because I don’t know. I can’t tell you what I don’t know. Can we come in?”

“Do you really have to carry all of those guns with you?”

“Yes.” The woman nods, and then she thinks it over and adds, as if extending an olive branch. “Would you like one?”

“No.” Helen says. “What’s he doing right now?”

“I’ve already told you. The impossible. Few men return as themselves from it. If they return at all. John’s asked us to keep an eye on you.”

Helen thinks of the shadow that presses into John’s back at night while he sleeps. She hopes the right parts of him will come back. Or maybe she doesn't need to hope. She already knows.

“Helen. Helen, wake up.”

She does. Slowly, and then all at once, when she realizes that John is there beside her, but he’s also bleeding. In the small pool of blood that’s now stained the bed sheet, Helen spies the remnants of John’s shadow. “John." Then, "Have you seen a doctor?”

“I will in a minute,” John says. “I just wanted to wake up next to you.”

“I’m surprised you woke up at all.” Helen examines herself. No blood. "Don't get me wrong, I'm glad you have."

John must have been meticulously careful. Only men who want to live are that careful. Helen knows just by looking at him that John is beginning to seem like himself, really himself, without the shadow. Helen could see him thinking again, as he stares down at his hands, both sides. When John is finally satisfied that his hands are clean, he touches the side of Helen's face and brushes some hair out of her eyes.

"After I see a doctor, do you want to go for breakfast?" John asks.

"Yeah." Helen nods. "Sounds good."


End file.
